


And wears his crown like silk

by Anecdoche (so_psychso)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Body Horror, Fluff and Angst, Hill Top Road, Lonely!Martin, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Spoilers for Season 5, Tape Recorder Theory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:21:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23915245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/so_psychso/pseuds/Anecdoche
Summary: The world is ending and Jon is gone, stolen into ascendance by the very horrors he unwittingly helped to bring into reality. Now, armed only with Jonah’s final statement and Jon’s voice—trapped in the reels of his recorder—Martin must brave the blighted wasteland alone, urged onward to an end he cannot begin to conceive of.Only… Jon’s not gone, is he. Because the words on the recorder change. Not often, and sometimes not at all, but he’s still there, secreted amidst the static, whispering terrible things, sufferings untold and un-witnessed—that mustbewitnessed if they are to have even a glimmer of hope. Hope to see this through. To see the world rectified and Jonah Magnus torn bloody form his watching throne. And maybe to see each other again, even if it’s for the last time.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 18
Kudos: 67





	1. disappearing act

**Author's Note:**

> Eyup, here's a thing because I, for one, am dreading whatever tragedy Jonny's got planned, so I'm taking matters into my own hands! This will hurt, but it won't be nearly as debilitating as canon. Dare I say, it might even be hopeful... In any case, please enjoy, god willing I'll be aiming for weekly updates. I love hearing back, so by all means leave a comment, kings <3
> 
> (Shout out to my beta Scraps as always <3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the world ends, and a tape recorder is found.

The echoes lay around him in syllabic shatters. Glass, wood, cadence, all have become one—an amalgamated _thing_ of viscous repercussion, blame and _hate_ in the wake of the world he’s ruined. Jonah’s manifest, presently in tatters and shreds of bloodied ink, flutters about the room, almost jovially, a sick mockery of delight at what it condemned him to do.

Behind his brain, at its cliff’s edge of sanity, a door mewls on its splintered hinges, letting his ocean pour through. 

He can’t move, of course not. There’s shock aplenty to contend with, and laying sprawled on the floor with the remnants of the window’s panes like halos around his head, his hands, seems the more amenable of inactions, the easiest thing he can’t do. Because tears won’t come. And his blood is too steady. 

Somewhere, in a middle distance he refuses to accept, the Watcher exults, delighted of its acolyte, slathering over all this new and tantalizing suffering. He doesn’t need to see to know that, either. The Watcher ensures its votary is well informed, thrusting wave upon wave of immeasurable terror through his battered cortices, corneas, every and anywhere it can leak its gleeful poisons. Between his bones. Axons and capillaries. Till his body feels suffused with each scream, full to bursting at the seams. But he’ll never tear apart. Not under the Watcher’s ministrant circumspection.

It intends to reward him, after all. To see him ascendant. As he has earned. As only _he_ could ever deserve. 

So, closing his eyes, he does not move, tries just as little to see either, and he simply waits, for that which he could not hope to ever again understand. He waits to die. He waits to be found. He waits for Martin.

He waits, he supposes, for whichever might deign to come last. 

-

And Martin’s first thought is him. Of course. Never himself, always the _else_ and _other_. As the sky rends in two, three, five hundred, _millions_ of slick, dark pupils, roiling masses pockmarking over the heavens, he thinks only of Jon. 

_Fuck._

There’s a good chance he screams this as he races back to the cabin, legs pumping full pelt with a ferocity that might surprise him were his attention less addled. But his mind’s a blur, stuck on a single track of _'_ _Oh Christ, Jon,’_ and his pulse gorges itself sick on adrenaline. Anything that doesn’t immediately assist him in getting the hell back to the cabin as fast as possible falls to the wayside, left to rot as the world does the same around him.

As if possessed of some cursed foresight, he’d not made it far on his walk, only about a kilometre or so, but the distance seems to yawn mile after mud-sucking mile as the hills around him heave and wheeze, the ground waking up under the Watcher’s guidance. Vaulting an abrupt protrusion of slate and soil that looks terribly too much like a hand, Martin executes another volley of deft parries and dodges, successfully subduing the maw of earth that opens in front of him with a faithless leap that lands him on his hands and knees. Something tugs at him—a burst of instinct, perhaps—and no sooner is he back on his feet than his hand prints are being swallowed by a swarm of maggots that writhe up from the grass. 

He spares them a horrified shriek, swallows a lurch of bile, and kicks off again, wending the cow trail he’d been following. Despite the dirt’s valiant effort to sway him otherwise, he finally pulls the cabin shakily into view, his vision winking in and out with white spots of overexertion, but he feels none of it beyond the thrall of desperate panic. And the cabin reels him in. Fixed. Sturdy. _Where Jon is_.

That’s the second thing he screams, throwing open the front door and charging to the bedroom.

_Jon. Jon. What happened. Who did this. Jon. Please._

It’s a miracle how many times Martin says his name, despite all the evidence—the devotion he clings to, the blind faith that Jon hasn’t been taken to the very center of this, leaving nothing behind for Martin to follow after. Even as he staggers to an uncanny halt before the bedroom’s threshold, several useless seconds manage to pass him by before the scene actually unfolds into his understanding.

The hearth he’d earlier stoked to a pleasant crackle is now cold, dashed to ashes and char, a spiteful cenotaph to the pile of logs he’d cut fresh the other morning. A sea of carnage stretches out beyond it, the single window blown in and busted, its panes strewn to wickedly sharp fragments, like ceremonial petals. Ravaged papers make a mosaic of the floor, and a stinging _snap_ of ozone turns the air electric against his skin.

All of this, but nothing more.

Jon’s not here. Not at the desk where Martin had left him. Not listlessly rifling through statements. Not rolling his eyes in exasperation as the damn tape recor—

There! The recorder. Toppled from the desk, it rests upside down on the floor where the glass has gathered thickest, hateful shards Martin ignores as he plunges his hand into them to retrieve the device. He weathers a gash for it across his wrist, but pays no further heed, clinging to the recorder like it might tell him where Jon is. It must. It _has_ to. What else does he have?

He’s not foolish, though, and he takes a moment to regroup, breathe, and examine the evidence. The state of the room bears no consequence to Jon’s disappearance; the detritus and destruction is merely the twisted aftermath. He’s not sure how he arrives at this conclusion, but it settles into his gut with a full-stop conviction, and he’s too terrified to contest it, otherwise. It would be easy enough—a damn nice _convenience_ —to assume some monstrous creature broke into the cabin and—and… 

“What have you done…”

Drawing no lines between who he means, himself or Jon, Martin sinks to his knees, the tape recorder clutched to his chest.

At the very least, he lands on something soft, slightly more forgiving than the hardwood floor or its glass embellishments. Looking down reveals a conspicuous pile of torn paper, the pieces stirring into a hypnotic maelstrom by the listless gusts eddying in through the broken window. Without thinking, Martin snatches up a handful before they can billow away. 

Trapping the recorder between his thighs—lest it disappear, too—he sifts furiously through the bits of statement. Most are unreadable, revealing only single words or butchered phrases embroidered on the stock in looping, elegant scrawl, and the best he can make out from the meager scraps he’s grabbed are: _deception; me to us; Archive_.

A cold blade of shivers lances down his spine at that last word. Instinctively, he looks at the recorder, still there between his legs, immutable plastic and tape and—

Something outside bellows, a mournful gurgle, like blood slopping down a backed up drain, and Martin jolts. The sound is far too close, far too amplified by the broken window and the sheer openness of the room that has revealed _nothing_. Save that Jon _isn’t_ in it. Isn’t anywhere. 

There’s only the rotten world, spoiled and souring as the Watcher puckers in delight.

The gurgle comes again, no further and no closer. The tape recorder refuses to budge. And Jon fails just as thoroughly to magically reappear. Some distant part of Martin’s clinging hope urges him to check the rest of the cabin, perhaps even the environs, but his embittered resolve knows better. There’s nowhere else Jon could have gotten to, no convenient entity that might have stolen him away. He’s simply gone, and Martin must somehow suture what’s been left behind. 

The tools to do so, he’s grimly aware, lie in this vivisected statement, in the bereft recorder. He has everything he needs to solve this. And he has nothing. For the world as he knew it has ended, a new era sprung cancer-like from its corpse, and it’s his fault. His fault for bringing Jon the statements, for not screening them. For leaving him alone to his precious, stupid monologuing. For not running fast enough, for not seeing, hearing, _feeling_ the agony that surely erupted from whatever hand of Jon’s was forced.

“I’m sorry,” he says, pitifully irrelevant against the percussive beats, jeers, and howls of the world turning itself inside out. 

For a blessed few seconds, the lull grows dimmer, muted and grey in his ears, and he blinks back tears as he peels his eyes from the statement and takes stock of his surroundings. 

He doesn’t laugh—should have expected this, really, the cloying fog that’s filled the room in faint gusts—although neither does he carry on crying. Merely, he lets the mist stay awhile, humbled by its protective indifference; at least, in the fray of its cinereal folds, the beastly world can’t touch him, and he can think.

He doesn’t, though. He just sits there, knelt at the foot of the Watcher’s first altar, relishing the simple quietude, losing himself to the white noise of his own unblemished misery. It’s only when he inadvertently shifts―fingernails of static climbing up his stiff legs—and sends the tape recorder clattering to the floor, that a necessary snap of shock arcs through the ice in his chest, thawing out a seed of molten horror.

Immediately, the Lonely flees, slithering from the room through the open window, Martin’s furious glare hot on its trail.

“Oh, fuck _right_ off,” he calls after it, that seductive apathy promptly usurped by a mounting, righteous anger. 

“I’ll have none of that!” He adds, for good measure.

He didn’t come this far to wallow away the end of the world. He has what he needs, now it’s a matter of getting his act together and bloody _fixing it_.

So, gathering up the recorder again, and as many of the statement scraps he can find, he ferrets both items away under the cushion of the room’s single, ratty armchair, and then sets about studiously barricading the window. He resolutely ignores the niggling voice chastising him for stalling, that he could just take both recorder and statement alike into the kitchen, the spare room, _anywhere_ but here, and actually get a move on. 

Somewhere less amenable to reason, he’s managed to convince himself such a thing would be nigh on blasphemous. How can he just abandon the last place Jon was? This is all so goddamn contingent on symbolism, isn’t it? Why shouldn’t the same basic principles apply? Granted, he has no idea what those principles might actually be, but that’s well beyond the point. 

For all his posturing, he’s done far sooner than he’d like, although there’s something to be said of his ingenuity and craftsmanship. Rather hands on, Martin is, when he’s forced to it, and the cabin was curiously forthcoming with its available resources. He’s no idea how much time has passed, operating on a numb auto-pilot that’s left him sweaty and aching. And still, everything pales in comparison to what’s waiting for him, the mysteries he has yet to suss out, sat unassuming as you please beneath a tattered cushion.

_Jon could be in terrible danger. Jon could be dead. Jon could be at the mercy of some brutish entity staking its claim in this decaying reality._

He knows almost none of that is true. But that’s all he knows, so he entertains each scenario because the alternative is still that awful _nothing_. After everything, the years under the Watcher’s thumb, the violence, the grief, the cold silence, the fitful climax, the escape… how can it be upended so suddenly? How can Jon just be _gone_?

The tape recorder, when he retrieves it, rests heavily in his hand. The statement, for its loathsome part in this, remains tucked away, leaving him to fall to his knees, again, landing hard on the floor, but it barely earns a wince. Nothing so menial as physical bruises could touch the freezing dread in his chest, the fallow winter that ekes out along each nerve and limb, seizing him in a bodily shudder as a volley of howling screams carries in through the cabin’s threadbare walls. 

His fingers can barely keep a fist around the recorder.

It feels wrong, hideously _wrong_ , a misstep of procedure that he hasn’t been given any sort of itinerary to. The recorder is his best bet; it must have Jon’s last moments on it. Might—might have…

“Just _do_ it!” He hisses to himself. 

It takes several false starts, his fingers trembling as if possessed of their own individual apprehensions.

_Come on, Blackwood, don’t be a bloody coward._

Even with a good lashing of self-abasement, it still takes him two, three more tries, until his quaking thumb settles on the play button. 

He’s just about to press it, when he gasps, lurching forward as if something’s reached into his sternum and yanked his guts through his ribs. The force is enough, though, enough to send him stumbling and catching his balance with one hand while the other flails out, gripping the recorder with terrifying strength.

Ensconced in bullet time, he feels more than hears it, the _chk_ resonating under the pad of his thumb, tingling up his arm, settling in the roots of his teeth.

It echoes.

And then, he begins to speak.

-

It’s all still there when he opens his eyes. The nothing of the cabin, of himself. He’s still there, too, in the barren, fractured room, cracked to its foundations, bathed in the light beyond the window that pulses a dull pallor of scleral purple and green—milky, sallow shades that make even his gaze recoil with nausea. 

Sitting up—because what the hell has laying down accomplished, waiting for the Watcher to behold him in chalk lines, maybe?—he hangs his head in his hands, and pleads silently for the spinning to stop. Round and round, his thoughts swirl and jostle and skitter. Some get left behind, trampled to death by their panicked comrades, but even they inevitably fall, rendering Jon’s mind little more than a great and gaping void, a pleasant balm of absence in its own sort of absolution. 

He basks in it for a moment, relishing the quiet. And then he screams, a barbed wire _flash_ of some far off suffering supplanted suddenly behind his eyes. A gift from the Watcher. A mother bird stuffing its fledgling.

“ _Stop, please_!” 

It doesn’t. Skin and stone. Buried or Flesh? It might be both, a terrible marriage consummating their equally abhorrent offspring. He collapses, again, curling fetally around himself as the images warp and re-solidify in rapid succession, prodding at his grey matter, leaving their many, many marks upon his already bruised mind.

“L’do anything," he mutters, he pleads. “J’st make it stop, ple- _g’ha_! M-Martin, ple _-ease_ make th’m stop!”

A violent spasm arcs through his spine, spidering up his nape, and he arches off the floor in a silent wail, frozen in a paroxysm of not-quite-pain. When he lands down, his middle vertebrae connect _hard_ with something that is not the floor, shooting pain of a _very_ real sort into his abdomen. And punching out a clean groan and cough, for good measure.

His faculties return with the realization that the _images_ have abated, wrenched out of him by that… fit. Or whatever he’s landed on. Keeping his eyes squeezed shut, he rolls onto his side, then his knees, and pats around the floor, feeling out the culprit of his now aching back.

He finds it soon enough—sooner than he would like, really, given what it is his hand closes around. To his credit, he manages to relinquish it in a very civilized manner, dropping the recorder in a satisfying clatter of injured casement and jostled tape. 

“ _You_ ,” he seethes, eyes wide, turbulent rage boiling at his tear ducts.

It doesn’t even stoop so low as to crackle in response, but Jon continues, unimpeded.

“What have you _done_? What _is_ this—tell me!”

He swipes at it, a lashing backhand that sends it gamboling across the floor and colliding with the far wall, the one beneath the broken window.

“What have you _done_ ,” he croaks, unable to stay his eyes from following his quarry’s trajectory, unable _not_ to look up and behold the Watcher beaming from the outside in. Into him, a flaying gaze of ten thousand pupils turned on _him_. 

They are so, so proud.

“What do you want!” 

Scrambling to his feet, he lunges for the windowsill, knocking the air loose of his lungs in another bout of vitriol, a volley of curses and coughs that’s carried swiftly skyward by a ferocious wind, a vertiginous gale that knocks him on his backside, mere inches, again, from the recorder’s loyal presence.

“ _Traitor_ ,” Jon spits, scrubbing furiously at his burning eyes. 

And, because it feels good, “ _Fuck you_.”

The recorder, predictably, does not rebuff him, remains only a battered heap of plastic and silent reels, spinning out nothing. Static for your thoughts? He almost laughs.

“Everything’s wrong, then,” he says, after some time spent indelicately resigning himself again to despair. 

He’s pulls his knees to his chest, nestles his chin atop them and, with his vision long ago gone blurry with tears he won’t let spill, he stares at nothing. Or, perhaps the wall, since that bears the least implication or direct harm. But who knows. Not him. 

“The world’s ended,” he continues, his tongue rationalizing what his head refuses to humor. He just hasn’t the wherewithal. Best to let it run its own course.

“I killed everything. I did what he wanted and-and everything’s _gone_. Everyone, Martin-he-I…

“Oh _Christ_ ,” he buries his face in his palms, the lines that web them like snares in silk— _ruined_ —and they’re all he sees no matter how tightly he keeps his eyes shut.

Still, he doesn’t cry, though his heaving shoulders and scraped raw throat make a valiant pantomime thereof. He wheezes and sputters, wishes for all the world to be as dead as he feels, because it’s all fucking _ruined._ And it’s all his fault. 

Time fails to make itself anymore readily apparent than sense, so there’s no telling how much or little of it has elapsed since he awoke to this, let alone the increments in between. Regardless, _some_ of it has to have gone somewhere, a lumbering of seconds into minutes that ferries him along, and deposits him in this moment. In this hope-dashed-on-the-rocks-but-still-breathing snap of seconds when everything changes.

The air around him; the weight of his blood, his bones; the ever present hiss inside his ear that clears, if only for the briefest of respites, so he can hear, dull as a funeral knell:

“ _Jon_?”

“Marti- _Martin!_ ” He clambers again to his feet, equal parts swaying and casting about, trying to discern the direction the voice came from.

“Martin! I’m here, by-in the-where _are_ you? 

“Martin? _Martin_!”

His panicked gaze lands anew upon the window, and he thunders towards it, convinced he’s about to look through and see Martin on the horizon, pursued by some fantastic horror, no doubt, but distinctly alive, nonetheless. Yes, he’s coming back, coming home to save Jon from what he’s done, to help him remedy this blighted earth, to fix this, to—

The recorder wails, a yelp of plastic against wood, as his determined footfalls send it careening once more against the wall, and Jon curses, a spark of pain jittering around his ankle.

“Bastard little dev-” he winds up a proper tirade to rain down on the seditious machine, but the words shrivel and die in his throat, the wretched thing having the _audacity_ to snap back at him with a crackle and hiss of static that runs his blood cold.

It pools thickly in his gut as the recorder gives a final sputter, keening out another last, faint, “ _Jon_?” before going quiet, tomb-like in its resolve. 

With similar prudence, time takes up its impossible mantle—too little or too much, who’s to say? Certainly not Jon, who says nothing as he freezes stiff, staring at the recorder and its static reels, as it fails to comply with his pleas. He’s waiting, whether he knows it or not. Waiting helplessly for this terrible reality to prove false, for it all to implode upon its own bloated weight. He’ll close his eyes, count until he forgets what numbers are, and the world will return, the Watcher will not _be_ , and Martin will tell him about cows over tea. 

He does not, of course, do any of this, nor does the world relinquish itself to such a kind and concise delusion. This is it. This is what he has to work with. Ruination, and a cruelly teasing light swinging on its own noose sans even the metaphorical tunnel to guide his way there—to ease the passage or make achievable a goal he hasn’t even parsed the shape of. No, instead this hope carouses with its own corpse, ambling in and out of view as his thoughts spiral into darkly treacherous territory. 

“Martin,” he says, a roughshod composition of his defeated soul and broken heart. His own gleed in the gloom, but it’s so weak, so faint, as he supplicates to the recorder’s silent will.

“ _Martin_ ,” he croaks again.

But there is nothing. Only himself, the recorder, the world gone wrong. Only that.

And beneath it all—the melodic underbelly, discordant and disillusioned—reverberates the spectral tangle of his love’s dislocated voice, gone, just as he is. Lost, forever it would seem, in the torporous gaze of the one who binds them all.


	2. turn | prestige

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which revelations are made—some bad, some worse, and some a bit... multi-faceted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No I do not know why the first two chapters are magician-themed, yes I will stand by them regardless bc I think they slap. Either way, thank you all for such a lovely reception, your comments made my week. I'm now aiming for updates every Saturday, and keep an eye on the tags/rating etc, as the plot is hardly 100% pinned down and I'm anticipating a few additions/changes. All that aside, please enjoy! This chapter wasn't beta'd but hopefully I caught all errors and such.

Martin’s nerves refuse to settle, scathing and jumpy like a particularly ornery flock of pigeons, save only one may be mollified by crumbs, alone. His ruthless agitator, the damn tape recorder, nestles still within his grasp, feigning ignorance to whatever the hell just happened, whatever possessed him to speak into it.

It doesn’t matter—shouldn’t, at the very least. He’d realized his mistake quickly enough, turned it off, and threw it on the bed. Paced a bit. Muttered, plenty. But found himself drawn inexorably back to the smug little ingrate. Which is where he is now, hunched at the foot of the bed, glowering at the miserable rectangle of gloating plastic. 

Funny, really, not a few weeks ago, he’d been almost fond of the blighters. Spooked, sure, when they popped up unannounced and already listening in, but nonetheless appreciative for their familiarity, a tether to Jon when he found himself sinking too deeply into Peter’s ruse. Or his own, for that matter. 

Presently, he’s determined to steal himself against the tendrils of transparent silver wriggling through the various seams of the boarded up window, and a proper glare sends them scattering, sure, but they keep slinking back. Periphery it seems, is not enough to keep them at bay, and he can’t ward off the chill between his ribs forever, can’t deny the weight in his palm that settles so sweetly into his bones, fraying his marrow with an unfairly mollifying melancholy.

Would if he could simply ignore the recorder altogether, perhaps have a go at the statement properly. Understandably, he’s come to loathe the adage, but knowledge really is power, and in his situation, he could rather use some—even his worst days in the Archives can’t compare. 

Never has he felt so useless, but he’s terrified of what he might find waiting on the reels, what might churn from its guts. The statement, on the other hand, will take time, a puzzle to forestall what he’s already deemed must be inevitable, but which can be denied until the last scrap of paper has been rectified. 

Here he wars with himself, snared at this crossroads of indecision, a will he won’t he waltz just out of step along a three count beat wailed in harmony with each beastly horror that shuffles and dies and rebirths itself beyond the cabin’s walls. 

“Just tell me what to do,” he tries saying to the unhearing recorder. 

He knows it doesn’t have to be this way, that the only true impediment is himself; he can record to his heart’s content, the reels spun eagerly enough at the behest of his earlier misstep. It doesn’t have to be any of this. I never _had_ to…

He blinks, shocked at the tears that glut his gaze and fall heavily onto his cheeks, coursing steadily down to his chin and finally dripping onto his hands. The recorder is spared the fallout, and he almost doesn’t bat an eye at the thin wisps of sea smoke lapping around his wrists, intangible shackles, grounding as much as they are gruesome. 

His thumb treks steadily for the recorder’s button panel, again sans his explicit volition, but he’s too drained to contest the motion. Worst of all, he’s curious, wants to see what will happen, wants to see what his subconscious has to say about all this. His surface level torments have drowned themselves, refusing to accept any aid, so why not let play out what lurks further beneath the waves? What could possibly tread the darkest shoals he dares not follow? What does it seek that he cannot see.

Evidently, this time, it’s the play button, and his heart gives an apprehensive swoop, but he’s pressing it down before he can object.

And… nothing. No _chk—jrrr_. No spinning reels disgorging the baritone murmur of Jon trapped in tape and plastic. No unspooled secrets. No goddamn answers.

Stupid. It’s so _stupid_ of him to think it’s this simple. Something’s taken Jon. It must have. Something broke in, devoured him, tore him limb from body, blood and bone, and Martin’s sitting here wishing on esoteric bullshit. 

“Fuck this,” he mutters, huffing to his feet, and the Lonely’s chittering tendrils swarming at his feet recoil as though kicked. He considers trying just that, but that would mean drawing more attention than they deserve, distracting him from… well, _something_ , some sort of goal.

Like he told them before, he’ll have none of this, thank you _very_ much. The less energy he diverts from the direct objective of finding Jon, the better. Fuck the Fears, fuck the recorder, fuck Jonah Magnus and his manipulative little plans for—

Wait. 

“What?” 

Staggering backwards, he whips his head around, expecting to find some scleral abomination leering back at him from the ceiling, or the far corner. Under the desk? No? His search comes up moot, leaving him stranded and wracking his brain for where the hell it conjured up that morsel of information. His answer finds him more than he does it, his foot crunching down on a pile of glass as he wagers a cautious step forward. 

“ _Shit_ ,” he must have missed it somehow in his diligent tidying efforts, a lie that comforts him about as much as, well, a shard to the sole, and he gingerly steps back. 

There, cloistered in the pile with all the self-righteous poise of a televangelist, a scrap of paper jeers up at him, apparently overlooked as well.

“Oh, sure, _sure_ ,” Martin derides, glowering at the shameless display. “Think I’m _that_ stupid, do you? 

“Try’n be more subtle, maybe!” This he shouts at the ceiling, again wishing for some convenient voyeur upon whom he might rain down his fury. 

When no such scapegoat proves forthcoming, he rounds back on the glass and paper, jabbing an accusing finger.

“Some free advice?” He says. “Don’t go putting shit in my head and _then_ show your hand, eh? Try that for starters.”

Neither glass nor paper offers a rebuke, and a marginal sense of accomplishment unfurls alongside the vitriol in Martin’s throat. Until he remembers why he’s shouting at inanimate objects. Then and there, his mind alights on the parched olive branch of his determination, and, suffering yet another cut, he plucks up the bit of paper, leaves the glass to wallow, and stalks over to the armchair. 

In a matter of moments—numbly rote _ticks_ of fickle time, Martin relinquishing his body to his mind’s apparent will—he’s sat on the floor, as far as he can get from the glass and window while still keeping both in view. In front of him, he piles the remains of the statement, and before he can think better of it, begins painstakingly sorting through. He’s both dying and dreading to know what the taunting last piece crushed in his palm says—no doubt stained with blood as he fails to stem the fresh flow—but with the flip of a 10p (tails for tell, heads for hide) he resigns himself to ignoring it when the good old monarchy comes face up. 

For a second, he entertains a quick non sequitur, trying to envision how well _they_ must be faring—Liz and her ilk. Probably the Vast got to them, although he takes small delight in imagining Jared and his lot running rampant in Buckingham, snapping up all the royal bones for themselves. If the world comes out of this the right way round, that’ll make for some proper discourse in academic circles. He can see it now, every contemporary journal clambering over one other to claim the next iteration of class war evolution.

He’s… getting off topic, and much to his chagrin, the statement before him has become no more or less complete, the subconscious urge that was all too happy to get him _in_ to this mess offering no such further handhold. Seems he can’t just check out and wait for this to sort itself. Brilliant.

At the very least, disgruntled rage suits him better than callous misery, making it easier to hinge his goals upon spite, which has always been an excellent motivator, in his opinion. Presently, it fires him up at about a half cylinder range of obstinacy; he’s not wholly angry, but neither does the Lonely come back a-creeping. Stuck in this middle ground, he resigns himself to the horrible task of Jonah’s statement, but he refuses to let any other emotions cloud his judgement. Judicious fortitude. Big words and all. Yeah. That’ll see him through.

Which completely overlooks the fact that he’s never liked puzzles to begin with. Loathes them, in fact. He’d force himself through two a week with his mum, just for the pretense of contact, and when Jon had asked around the Archives for anyone who might know a thing or two about jigsaws well, he’d jumped on the opportunity to prove himself.

Seems he’s having to do so, again, and he ensures to channel every ounce of his anger into the tips of his fingers as he sifts and sorts and smooths out the statement. It’s official Institute stock, too, letterhead and all. A real kick in the teeth, and never has he itched quite so badly for a lighter. 

As though he’s entertaining an amnesiac, the recorder keeps to itself beside his knee, dull and aloof, save that Martin can’t quite shake the feeling it’s waiting. If it’s for better things or worse, he can’t tell, but his fingers seem to want to work faster under duress of its audience, his eyes gleaning matching phrases with staggeringly adroit efficiency. When he blinks—which he hasn’t actually done over the past five minutes—the image on the floor reveals nearly half of the first page completed, the frail, frayed edges of paper barely touching one another and yet so perfectly matched as to be almost unscathed. Seamless.

Forcibly blurring over his vision, Martin grits his teeth and carries on with the rest of it, refusing to acknowledge the statement until it reveals its entirety. Despite his diligence, some snippets and words squirm their way into his awareness, but he lingers on them no longer than necessary, and they shuffle into the queue, resigned only to whatever article or conjunction bound the more portentous adverbs and nouns. Yes, they can bloody well wait their turn.

All the while, the ending-world provides him commentary, a sibilant gist of what’s going on, what could just as easily come _inside_ and yet so conveniently does not do so. It’s music, in its own right, the score of the apocalypse, and he’s not exactly going to dig out his phone and waste charge on Spotify in case he ever gets somewhere with decent signal, but even a twisted little part of him has to laugh at _Lo-fi Beats to Survive Armageddon to._

Gurgles and cries, splintering cracks and what could just as easily be a flute as someone’s trachea inverting itself, each horrible iteration of sufferings untold soon relegate themselves to mundanity, Martin grimly set in his task, and they fade to a background hum, white noise that Martin lets lull him into a rhythm. 

Pick up a scrap. Clean edge? Yes? Okay, right, left, top, bottom? What about corners? Now, which page. None of that? Fine. Any bisected serifs? Yes: find its match. No: check the tearing. Match it up. Set aside. Repeat. _Ad infinitum._

Save, there’s nothing endless of this, and soon he’s gone and fleeced himself of statement, four and a half pages fanned out in front of him. Disregarding the last piece in his fist, of course, his skin crusted over with dried blood from the cuts as he clutches it. Shakily, he loosens his fingers, unfolds the scrap, and still without seeing fully, places it among the rest. It makes its home on the first page, the only smattering of that volute longhand to sit alone in a sea of unblemished cream stock. A salutation. He doesn’t have to focus to know that. Or to know what it says. _Who_ it is said to. But he has to, of course. Contingencies, fates, etcetera and all that. He has to see. 

_Hello Jon_

It reads like potpourri gone rotten in an oil slick, or perhaps a gasp of syrupy phlegm spat down his throat. Cloying, thick, lurid and intense, almost entrapping his gaze and forcing him to read the rest. Almost.

Unlike Jon, though, Martin has a choice. An impossible, nausea-wrenching decision, but he makes it in spite of the dizziness that overcomes him, thrusts his own asperity right back at the statement as it scrapes its fingers over his tongue. 

He will read it, but it will _not_ read him back. 

Unbidden, a memory rears its ugly head, recollections of previous times when he’d battled similar exertion. When Jon kept disappearing, leaving Martin and the others to pick up the slack. When statements far less cumbersome than this left him exhausted and jittery, like a shot of caffeine straight to the brain stem. When six months limped by, and the only thing that kept the compulsion at bay was the sickly discomfort of Peter’s un-presence, the void he brought sulking through the Archives, through Martin, blunting his nerves to the sting of statements.

Wait.

He blinks—keeps forgetting to do that—and suddenly everything’s teetering over the edge of a discovery just out of his reach. He keeps blinking, coaxing the glimmering realization closer, closer, till he makes a measured leap, a mental grab, claws and all. And—

Oh… fuck. 

And all he needs to do to confirm these dawning suspicions is to look down at his wrists and forearms, his knees, splashed with mud and mystery fluids from his earlier fall. Therein lies the evidence, for the image of himself, stains and all, has become faded, just barely visible through a veil he so dearly wishes was only the result of more tears. 

Alas, no such luck, and, upon sensing its recognition, the palette of mirror-green brume draping itself catlike over him turns decidedly opaque, squirming around his skin and sinking into his joints, filling the little holes in his marrow with falsehoods of contentment—camaraderie, even—from a thing that would sooner kill than console him. 

And yet there _is_ a bond—was always a bond, wasn’t there? By nature of its own antithesis, the Lonely and Martin are never not… _something_ to each other. And whether he recognized it then or if it’s only come to him now, he’s wielding it regardless, as much a rapier as Jon’s skillful eyes and tongue. Though his is more wholly passive, a defense, an instinct against Jonah’s prying words, against his own bleeding heart. Compulsion and coercion, an indifference just bordering on full blown lassitude such that he’s able to straddle the line of both: the Lonely Beholder. 

Through the lethargy of Forsaken’s lens, Martin arrives dully to this conclusion, not nearly as perturbed as he knows he should be, but he’s taken hold of the recorder again, grounding himself in its hard edges and unforgiving secrets. That’s something. Always _is_ something. 

Always—

“Jon.”

He tests the name in the quiet rush of water that roars in his ears, a far off ocean where it doesn’t hurt. From that word, the single syllable in his throat, ripples bloom out and out and out, and just as his heart poises to pitch itself from the widow’s watch of his rib cage, they return, beaten and battered, yes, but still largely intact. Still a chance. 

He blinks, and there’s anger behind it again, the room juddering back into view, lopsided and warped through the fog that still ensconces him, but there’s no ocean, no sand. And it hurts. _Good_.

For a moment, he entertains an attempt at shock, staring nowhere in particular and pulling ragged breaths as if he’s run a marathon. When neither he nor the fog budge, their terms met on equally tenuous grounds, he concedes. 

He’ll let it scavenge his heartstrings in exchange for anonymity to Jonah’s thrall. He’ll be quick about it. He will _not_ succumb.

Looking down at the statement, that soothing balm remains draped over his vision, like opening his eyes underwater. There’s even the sting of salt, though he knows that’s hardly the Lonely’s doing.

Before him, the parchment lies in wait, suspended between the witness and abstainee such that he can still see it, yes, the four pages in the succession he reconstructed, although everything that _makes_ it a statement—that gritty seduction, right down to the punctuation—is virtually unrendered. Jonah’s hand blurs steadily in great swaths of fuzzy black and cream, radio static that tingles like styrofoam and cotton against Martin’s gaze. 

Except, that is, when he shakes off enough of the fog to truly focus, pulling one single word from the ether of apathy. In this manner—dismembering it word by word so that none of them bear any greater meaning on their surrounding locutions—he thinks he might be able to read the statement. Read and reveal nothing of himself in turn, except, of course, to the Lonely, but that’s a sacrifice that long ago lost its potential. He doesn’t care about the method; only the result matters.

He starts at the beginning.

~~_Statement._ ~~

~~_Of._ ~~

~~_Hazel._ ~~

_Rutter._

He stops, his tongue convulsing, his fingertips gone utterly numb as to be shards of ice hovering millimetres above the paper, picking out each word in its turn, holding it in place, feeding it back to his brain, which discards it the second he moves on to the next. What the hell came before _Rutter_? He goes back. 

_Hazel._

Wait, back from what?

_Rutter._

_~~Rutter~~. _

_Hazel._

_~~Hazel~~. _

_Rutter._

He blinks, blinks, _blinks_ , wresting bits of Lonely from himself, forcibly unpicking its stitches where its made uncomfortable pleats of him until he can see the seams in the statement, can see it in full, its broken mass of words and treachery, its malevolence shocking into full view once more. 

Almost immediately, he pitches forward, eyes scrambling to devour its mysteries. 

“ _Statement of Hazel Rutter,_ ” intones that which is not himself, “ _regarding a fire in her childhood ho—_ ”

Something squeals. Something screams. Something bleeds because it hasn’t the vocal cords to do those other things properly, so it supplements itself on pantomime. A mimicry of human agony, a starvation of sound that arcs across Martin’s vision, delivering a static shock to his senses that _snaps_ something just behind his eyes. Just like that, the beckoning words lose their luster, washed out, varnished over with silver and silence that emanates from something that is neither him, nor the Watcher, nor the Lonely.

The tape recorder. In his hand. And the scream. In both their throats. 

Did he turn it on? 

He blinks and finds himself still staring at words, cast back into their cathode-ray pastiche, unreadable save for one, the last one his eyes had fallen upon before the Lonely intervened. Before the recorder—

_statement_

It’s not capitalized; there’s no surrounding punctuation, so it neither begins nor ends anything. Simply, it is its own entity, and returned to the Lonely’s mists and deceptions, Martin begins to understand. 

It’s not one or the other: Lonely or Beholding. It’s both. It has to be both. It’s always been _both_ . He can’t read the statement entwined in solitude, and neither can he bear Jonah’s creed sans that safety net of ambiguity. There must be a compromise, a balancing act of two equally volatile equations. And the final integer rests in his hands, the malnourished beast that is and is not the crux of this all—that _is_ the last remnant of Jon. That… saved him.

He wishes so terribly Jon were here, so he could mock the man endlessly for these unutterably _stupid_ intricacies. But Jon is what necessitates them, and that would contrive a paradox far worse than what Martin’s presently tackling. Which makes the Lonely’s icy indifference all that more enticing, a respite for him to disregard how infuriating the Fears are and focus on the achievable.

That being, the glaringly obvious contingency he missed. Because of course, of _course_ he has to read the statement aloud, but he has to anchor it at the same time, has to contain Jonah. A snake’s severed head will still bite, after all, and how have they done this before? What was the _entire_ bloody point of the Archives?

The second he completes this thought, the recorder gives an assenting shriek, a peal of static that makes him jolt, even as the Lonely tries its best to muffle the sound. 

‘ _Okay_ ,’ he says, focusing on how the word shambles between his teeth, holding its memory close as its physicality flakes apart under duress of Forsaken’s shroud. Far off in the firmament of his mind’s eye, a shoreline curls in on its infinite self, but the word still comes back to him—still a ripple, a consequence. 

‘ _Right_.’

And because there’s a root of stubbornness in him yet, he spares a glance at the tape recorder and adds, ‘ _Let’s try it your way_.’

And he tries the statement again, its first words taken like rancid communion as the recorder churns steadily in his grasp. He presses no buttons, but the second his tongue curls around that first ‘s’ it’s off to the races. _Chk-jrrrrr_ , and the words obey the will of Forsaken, unable to inflict anything upon Martin beyond their prose, the simplicity of narrative. And the recorder steadies him from slipping too far, from not understanding the subtleties hoarded amidst Jonah’s apotheosis. 

It’s pathetic, really, bitter like the skin of a grape after too long left in an oppressive humidity. It gets caught in his teeth, burns his tongue with its self-importance, its faux-grandiose spiel. He hates it, and he takes it, committing the words to their prison, cajoled by the ease in which it all flows back and forth, around and around in cyclical tandem between his lonely self and the voracious recorder. And Jon had always bemoaned the staleness of old statements, so perhaps a second recitation will give Jonah a taste of that medicine, will nullify this catastrophe, even if only marginally.

He’s half convinced of this victory until he comes to the last page. There, the Fears are laid bare for all of his eyes and mouth to endure, but he can’t stop, of course not, can’t even call upon the Lonely to mitigate the blow of each iteration, each terror stripped to its skeleton for rite and ritual.

And when all is said and done, when the door is opened its second time, hanging off the hinge of Martin’s slackly weeping jaw, there comes another _chk_ , resoundingly satisfying with a succinctness that sounds awfully much like the recorder clicking off. But as he shivers back to a semblance of self in the weak embrace of the Lonely, the static still squeals over the roar of the ocean and fog, the device still listening in his hand. 

‘ _What_?’ He asks it, but his lips are so numb it’s hardly a murmur, his mind and body spent into an exhaustion that goes, somehow, deeper than bone or blood. So he thinks, instead, because there’s no reason the recorder can’t read his mind, too.

_What could you possibly still want_?

The last thing he’s expecting is an answer—is, “ _Martin_?” ushered through the static, parting the ocean in his head, upon his shoulders, crackly at first, then clear as a bell, then more _hiss-pop_ ambiance. Then again. More. His name and _more_.

“ _Martin_ ,” comes the voice. His voice. _Jon’s_ voice. Breathless and incomplete but _him_ . “ _Look d—n, Martin, — you see -t_?”

Struck dumb, Martin does as instructed, tearing his eyes from the statement and focusing them on… down, the direction as vague as the directive, but it needn’t really have been otherwise, the proverbial bell struck once more as his vision alights on something… entirely else. 

There, moored at some intangible point in his chest, a single, glistering strand of tentative construction drapes down his sternum, his stomach, the color of bleached zirconium and infinitely more fragile in width and whim as it scintillates in and out of view, here and then not and then here, falling further from his person to wind around his wrist. There, it coils thickest, though Martin feels nothing of its weightless composition, can only stare in abject confusion—the ocean now contesting to a roar with the static in his ears—as it winks out of visual existence one last time. 

And then returns, a final, brilliant coruscation, and Martin fairly chokes when he realizes where it is the thing has anchored itself, its diaphanous other end wriggling into the cassette chamber where it stitches itself around the heart of the tape, the reels, turning and turning and tangling up everything in a glimmering web.

_Oh no._

_Oh_ **_fuck_** _._

At the precipice of this epiphany, the world jars violently, slamming into his head with the blunt force of ten dozen fists, knocking loose the Lonely, Beholding, all of it, leaving Martin tethered only by the squirming lattice writhing from his ribs and gumming up the recorder. Save it’s still working, still spinning static even with what he now knows must be the Mother’s ministrations. 

“ _Martin_?” Still comes Jon’s voice, a final blow to Martin’s shock, reality battering its way past his teeth in a nigh exalting exhalation. 

“Jo-Jon! Jon? Christ, _Jon_!” Ignoring the bindings in his person and the recorder, he nearly topples over himself as he clutches the recorder to his mouth. “Can you hear me? Jon! _Jon_!”

_Hiss-pop-jrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr—_

_Chk._

The line goes dead, and with it, Martin’s hope as he watches the Web’s lariat begin to fade, flickering as if in pain, like a firefly kept too long smothered in a jar. 

“No! No no no no _no_!” 

He mashes his thumbs on the button panel. Nothing. Tries grabbing at the silk between his ribs and the recorder’s. Nope. He can only watch, relegated to the condition he loathes most of all, as everything is wrenched from him once more. Even the Lonely’s diligent tides have fled his ears, balked by the pulsating mess leftover from Jonah’s revelation. 

“You can’t _do_ this,” he cries feebly, to whatever it is that has, in fact, done precisely all of this. 

His weary mind snags upon the image of the Web’s interference, because wouldn’t that be so nice and neat? Merely the Mother pulling strings again, such that all he needs to do is cut them and everything will be set back to rights. Except he can’t exactly do that if he can’t even get a hold of Her damn web.

“ _Please_ ,” he curls in on himself, the recorder pressed painfully into his chest like he might subsume it for a heart instead of the broken thing throwing his blood askew, faux splashes of adrenaline that slog to a grinding halt at each pulse point. Especially his wrists.

“I saw it,” he whispers. “I did, I _saw_ it. Jon please, _please_. I know what happened, I know what he did to you, _please_. Jon, _Jon_ …”

He can’t help the feeling, though, that this isn’t what Jon meant, and the Web need not make itself visually apparent for him to entertain further anxieties. Just as well, it doesn’t seem keen to. Or maybe able to. 

Regardless of how much vitriol he puts behind his myriad questions, no answers provide relief. He tries rationalizing everything that’s occurred in the past… how long has it been? It doesn’t matter, because he keeps getting stuck on Jon and his last words, not the words themselves—he’s arrived refractorily at their conclusion—but the subtext, the implication of them altogether. Words that could not have been prerecorded, that were too perfectly timed. Words that have to mean Jon is alive in some ever nebulous space or some _where_. That he’s able to reach out to Martin—evidently by having struck some accord with the Web, which Martin refuses to dwell on, but Jesus Mary and Joseph, if that isn’t the icing on the apocalypse. 

And it’s got him, too, lashed to his sternum, trying to tow the recorder into submission. At least he hopes so. If there’s anything good left in this world, let it be that the Web has not decided to make a marionette of his misery just yet. He’d like to think they’d have some favor with it, besides, that this isn’t all some twisted game for the Mother, eking out their anguish, casting his hope in with the wrong lot. 

He’d like to think many lofty things, in fact. Instead, he succeeds only in thinking of Jon, which all things considered is his best option. With the addition of what he’s gleaned from Jonah’s statement, he almost feels prepared. What for, though? He hasn’t a clue. He can take a stab at it; he’s always been good at improvising. Still this is going to take one hell of a wriggling mess to gouge out, and he doesn’t even have the dignity of a corkscrew.

“Jon,” he says again, blinking back tears and taking in the silent visage of the recorder.

No strings. No sounds. With his faculties all his own, Martin jabs the play button, then record, rewind, all of them, the whole panel like ivories beneath his touch. But none of them catch, nothing strikes the ill tuned wires of tape. No sing of static. No Jon. 

He slumps where he’s sat, maintaining only enough posture to ensure the recorder doesn’t topple to the floor. Head propped against the foot of the bed, knees pulled up, he sniffles quietly to himself as the wails of the world gone wrong slink back in around him. 

He almost laughs, because he’d _almost_ forgotten about all that, so he holds his face in his hands for a while, waiting for it all to quieten. It does at length, but only when he’s halfway shivering to acute hypothermia does he realize why that is, and he peaks through his fingers to see, yup, of course—the fog, chilling and profuse, and kind of… snappy, emanating an air of offense that takes him a second to parse. 

‘ _Oh come off it_ ,’ he snaps back when he realizes _why_ it’s putting on such an attitude. ‘ _Like it was_ **_my_ ** _fault. Yeah, sure, thanks for keeping Jonah at bay, but I can hardly control what_ **_She_ ** _does, you know_?’

Were he inclined to feel, this would surely fall in the realms of silliness. Talking to sentient fog; his only reciprocal companion. The irony sets his teeth on edge, and he grimaces.

‘ _I’m not falling for you_ ,’ he continues, without any bravado to back up the assertion. ‘ _’ll tell you right now, okay? You’re convenient, and I’m glad for it, but that’s about all you’re getting out of me. You use me, and I’ll use you right back, deal_?’

There’s a negligible shift in temperature, a bit of blood stinging back into his fingertips and toes, and he sighs, regarding the puff of mist that issues from his mouth with little interest and even less concern. This, in turn, seems to further placate the Lonely, and it lets up another inch, then another, till its just the ocean in his ears and a few strands of fog stuck limpet-like to his wrists. 

“ _I swear, if you’re trying to imply bloody manacles or some shit_ ,” he warns, and the fog seems to pout. 

“ _You’re not clever!_ ” Martin tells it—almost, _almost_ laughs, a breathy exhale perching in his throat. 

And then the fog goes still, its eddying swirls of otherworldly mist and ice freezing over. It doesn’t solidify exactly, it just… stops, and Martin stares, eyes narrowing, mouth pulling taut as a question usurps his levity. He’s afforded no chance to ask it. 

With an almost pained contortion, the Lonely bursts outward from itself, enveloping him completely in its frigid grip. 

_‘Hey!_ ’ he manages, before the word falls apart to echoes again, his strength deflating along with it, his fear gentled to a murmur of itself, a simulacrum of panic and dread and _need_ that just… doesn’t matter anymore. 

_Chk_ , says something, from a thousand miles thick in the mist, and the ocean gives a small surge, the tide behind his sandy eyes pushing, rolling, building up a crest. He lets it, lets his head fall forward with the muffled crash of water upon shoreline. Somehow, he’s surprised to find tears burning down his cheeks.

Less surprising, is what unspools from his chest once more, burning sterling into his dove-grey gaze.

‘ _Oh_ ,’ he says, bringing a hand to where the Mother’s bindings hurt him worst, and something tells him that’s good.

He doesn’t know what, or who, if that might be the case, but he believes it, and follows the thread back to the recorder—for the sake of novelty, he tells himself, because its easier to lie in the Lonely. No one’s around to contest the truth.

_Jrrrrrrr_ , says the recorder when he reaches it, stroking a finger where _REC_ has been clicked down again. He should wonder about that. He knows he should, but he couldn’t care less to, and instead wanders his finger up, tracing it forlornly over the chamber.

By all rights, the cassette inside should not be spinning, but the silk in its reels bears no ostensible physicality, and as little as Martin can actually grasp it, so too does it refuse to encumber the recorder’s efforts.

‘ _Alright_ ,’ he says to it. To this… Mother, Beholden. 

She doesn’t show Her hand for nothing, after all.

And as the fog moves in, swallowing him back up, he manages to whisper, ‘ _What do you want me to do_.’

_Jrrrrrrr_ , says the tape, and he listens for a long, long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (smash that like if you want to see Jared go ham on the royals, comrades)


	3. subject(ive)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which things get a little bit tangled up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *does a lil dance* haha wow hi how is everyone? long story short, my chronic illness nerfed me back in May and as s5 progressed, I had no motivation to work on this. Given this structure of Acts and breaks, I think I'm keen to give this another shot because, lads I'm just not feeling canon. So yeah, taking things into my hands and headcanons. I'm not going to commit to an update schedule, but given how I plan to mesh my canon w this first Act's, it shouldn't be too hard to get stuff out. Please enjoy! And please do leave a comment, they always make my day <3

There’s no telling how many seconds, minutes, hours have passed him by since he last heard Martin’s voice. He tries counting them, staring daggers at the recorder all the while, but reaps no result. To better channel his energy, he takes to keeping rhythm with his frantic, pacing footfalls as he careens around the room like a whirlwind, determined to osmose as little of the spurious world as possible. 

He continues seething at the recorder, a burning gaze that might be equal parts tears and anger, but now? As he’s halted dead in his tracks by the sound of static switching on—sans his effort, his _consent_ —it is unequivocal rage that turns his breath serrated and quick, his pulse ringing in his ears alongside the recorder’s gall. 

The bloody thing has turned itself on once again, spewing out its chittering static, and he’s just about to rain down a monsoon of expletives when something stops him, killing the curses on his tongue.

It is neither his nor Jonah’s voice that worms its malformed way out of the layers of distortion. Instead, Martin’s trembling tenor cuts a gash through the tightly woven suspicion Jon has enshrined himself in. 

“ _Statem—— J—— M—nus regarding Jo——— Sims, th- Ar—vist.”_

It takes more of those stupid, pointless seconds for Jon to realize what exactly he’s hearing, but when he does, the door at the back of his mind splinters entirely off its threshold, plummeting into an abyss of pounding blood.

“ _Martin_!”

He crashes to his knees, just narrowly missing a waiting pile of glass. Screaming into the recorder, he frantically mashes down each button over and over, but still the device carries on its dutiful cruelties, forcing him to listen as Martin takes Jonah’s statement. 

“ _Why d—— man see———stroy — world?_ ”

“Don’t do this, _please_ , don’t do this to him!”

But Jon has never been in any sort of position to make demands, has he? Has never been able to bend his accursed powers to such a will that might benefit anyone but himself, even when he most loathes it. _Especially_ then. 

For a vile, moldering part of him _has_ to know: what can become of Jonah’s statement perused a second time, put down again in magnetic tape when the world is already his? The antithesis to Jon’s curiosity hopes for balance, for countermeasure. It’s stupid, naive and stupid, and the parts of Jon that have no affiliation beyond regret and horror and sadness know there is no solution to be found in Martin’s diatribe.

And so Jon cries. Shameless and raw, rolling sobs that cleave his chest in two. But even with the recorder’s shoddy relay, he can’t drown the sound out, each syllable of Jonah’s statement tattooed onto his memory, his tongue, his blood and bones and bile, and now an even starker recitation in Martin’s mouth. There’s no consolation in the static, the eviscerated syllables, only the fear that the next pause, the next butchered word, will be the last Jon hears. For what is worse? That which is known? Or that which is not.

He wants to throw the recorder, wants to spill its guts in the glass and hear it bleed out. But he can’t, because Martin’s _there_ , not a delusion, not a phantom made to torment him in this purgatory, and not… stopping. Even as the static crescendos, the words flow in their iterant congregation.

“ _Martin_ ,” he tries, uselessly pressing the play button, record, play again.

“Please,” he bargains with nothing left to offer but the same, rote dialogue. “Please don’t do this. Please, _please_.”

Who would hear him, though? He is not there on the other side of this veil where all but himself writhe and ache and succumb to the victimhood he has thrust upon them. The bringer of doom, he is, and he’s not even allowed to suffer. What a fucking joke.

Pitching forward, his spine consoles him in a contrite arch, face wedged against his knees, hands strewn loosely around his head with the recorder at their entangled center.

As all things inevitably do, the immediacy and shock die away, withering to a liminal sort of acceptance, a crossroads bridging his terror and his enmity, and he’s stranded at the middle. Solemnly, Martin marches his way through Jonah’s words, so soft as to be silk in Jon’s ears, but it muffles nothing, and he can hear the tears just as thoroughly as he envisions them slick and shining on Martin’s face.

What he would give to wipe them away, to kiss Martin’s ruddy cheeks, his closed eyes, his lips, hushing his mouth to never again utter so many atrocities that were not meant for him—were never meant for anyone but Jon. 

Unsurprisingly, his wishful thinking accomplishes nothing, and he’s still caught in the eye of the storm, Martin trodding ever closer to the end. 

“I’m so sorry,” Jon whispers, his thumb brushing over the button panel, perhaps in some chastened effort to get his message through.

“I’m sorry, Martin, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please, _please_ —”

“ _—n’t wor— Jon_ ,” apes Martin. _“—’ll g——— here, in — world — we -ve made._ ”

“ _No_ ,” Jon cries meekly.

Heedless, the invocation arrives, stammered from Martin in a shower of stilted consonants and mutilated inflections.

It’s… nothing like the frenzy that overtook Jon at its peak, almost nothing at all, considering the gravity of everything else, and Jon could weep with relief, even goes so far as to let his head fall back and choke on a cascade of laughs that tumble from his grimacing lips. 

He keeps laughing, until he looks down, and the mirth is strangled from him in quite another manner, altogether, though he does find it funny that what he sees hasn’t even the decency to tangle around his throat. Still, as he takes in the sight of the singular, pale string flowing from his sternum and spooling onto the floor around the recorder, he can’t help—what is this exactly—judge? Almost? How heavy-handed the display is. 

“Is that it, then?” He asks the Weaver of this loom. “We’ve resorted to _this_?”

For, like a joint snapping back into its socket, he understands, not the precise parameters, no, but had She sent a hoard of spiders, the effect would have been no different. A desultory strand, however, vexes him more than anything. Another goddamn mystery on the pile. Especially as its apparent waypoint appears to be the recorder, which he’s already bloody figured out on his own, Christ above.

He’s about to vocalize as much of his ire when the static—having gone dormant into a white noise hum— _hiss-pops_ and Martin’s voice carries through, no longer burdened by Jonah’s thrall or the intermittence of a bad connection. 

_What could you possibly still want?_

Except… it doesn’t sound spoken. Jon knows Martin’s cadence, the cracks and dips, and this delivers too smoothly, too succinct a sentence to be anything else but ripped wholesale from his head, where nothing suffers the indignity of a trembling tongue or caught-in-the-throat reticence.

The second Jon connects these dots, that strand in his ribs gives a violent _tug_ , jerking him forward. From his newly coerced vantage point, he sees the other end of it writhing under the _REC_ button, pulsing and and cajoling, almost breaking the plastic out of its hinge. 

“No!” 

He lunges for it, horrified at the prospect of losing this one means of–of _whatever_ this is he has with Martin, but in his haste, the heel of his hand slams down on the panel, triggering each button.

All but one _clicks_ into place, and he gags as the coiled strand beneath _REC_ seems to burst and ooze, a thick slime, like a crushed insect’s innards, coating the plastic and his skin where he’s trapped it. 

He’s about to scream, about to drop it, but the newly severed end thrusts into action, wrapping its wounded self around his wrist, lashing his hand to the recorder, and a voice he does not recognize erupts softly between his ears—swaddling silk to the unremitting hush of static.

It says: _Know what binds you, Archivist_.

“ _Martin_?” He blurts dumbly.

And that which does indeed bind him—the end that’s tangled in his chest—crawls up, tickling the back of his throat till he nearly gags. The end tethering his hand and the recorder squeezes, too, in a strange, morse-like rhythm he hasn’t the cipher to.

“Martin,” he tries again, transfixed by this alien display, the Web practically offering itself belly-up.

Or perhaps offering a truce. A solution. A… way.

Realization strikes him over the head like a drift of snow—a soft, dull _pmf_ that trickles clumps of freezing cold down his nape, over his eyelids. 

“ _Look down, Martin,_ ” he says breezily, doing the same, in awe of the offering that has chosen to tether them _._ “ _Do you see it_?”

Martin must. He _does_. And it is not the beast within Jon that knows this. It’s not the Watcher or the Archivist, though both gnaw hungrily at the slipknots of his impromptu serenity. Jon knows this is just _himself_ and that alone, so far away from the one he loves, and yet look at what is made manifest in their wake. A dowry of the Web, yes, but not wholly _Its_ own, instead an ultimatum forged for the purpose of grounding them both as they navigate this unforeseen in between. And forged _by_ them as much as it is a result _of_ them.

It’s… almost unbearably maudlin, but it’s _theirs_ , and he’s bloody well going to use it to drag himself back to Martin’s side of reality, even if it snaps a thousand times over.

“ _Martin_ ,” he breathes, a last baleful prayer on his tongue he doesn’t quite register until the static troubles, hitches, and through it comes a stricken:

“Jon?” 

And then the string between them goes dull, cloudy and brittle, like frosted glass, and the record button _chks_ , silence ringing out after the _hiss-pop_. 

The back of Jon’s eyes, his throat, burn something fierce, but he does not lift his gaze from the recorder, watching the reels of the cassette encased inside, almost mummified by the remnants of the Web’s offering. 

It fades of course, but the weight in his chest does not. He suspects that, were he to _look_ for it, he’d have almost no issue ferreting out the Web’s silk, strewn between him and that vanishing point just beneath the button panel. He doesn’t, though; it’s not necessary. It’s there. And it’s there for Martin. Jon can’t begin to understand what the Web could mean by this, but that’s always what She wants, and, yes, this is… uncharacteristically generous, but that’s not the same as having answers. 

“I don’t believe you,” he finally says to the empty air, the empty room, the empty world filling up with muted terror. 

No response. 

“And I won’t, either,” he continues, emboldened anyway.

_But I’m going to use you_ , he thinks, not at all convinced that She hasn’t the means of listening in, but it allows an illusion of privacy, something he used to find in the tape recorder, but that’s been rather stripped from him now, hasn’t it. Besides, he’d like to think She’d appreciate the irony of a puppet tangling its own strings.

_I’m going to get back to him. I’m going to fix this._

As if in response, the cabin lets loose a groan around him, and he braces, for the world to crash down, for this meager house that is no longer a home to buckle and warp. For the Web’s hand to flare to life again and strangle the sedition from his throat. 

Instead—

_Chk-jrrrrrrrrr._

He half laughs, half sobs, the button panel unperturbed under his hand’s ministrations, yet the reels of the contained cassette whir and murmur, the Web like a ripcord to the tape.

“You just… won’t let up, will you,” he says.

The response this time is only static, no grand, revelatory speech from Martin, but he’s had more than his fair share of such silence in the past. He won’t be appeased so easily. 

So, hunkering down, he plants himself cross-legged on the floor, his back to the foot of the bed for support, his eyes trained solely on the recorder. Bowing over it, he murmurs, thickly, “ _What do you know."_

The compulsion sits ticklish and furtive on his tongue, hardly the monsoon that once overtook him when feasting on living terror, but enough to make both him and the recorder twinge uncomfortably.

“ _M’sorry_ ,” he grits out, the device shuddering in his grasp as it fails to divulge anything besides hissing peals of white noise interspersed with the errant _pop_.

But he _needs_ to know, needs to hear Martin, needs Martin to hear him back. 

_I’m so sorry_.

And there’s something forgiving about the static, yes, but his quest for absolution dried up with the rotten world. Now, he can only hope to save those who matter. And this—sat alone in the middle of it all—this is where it must start.

  
  
  


-

  
  
  


Has he ever penned a poem about time? Seems he should have at some point, right? Everyone does; even those who scorn the title “poet” for its pretensions are liable to consider even such mundane existentialisms. Off the top of his head, though, nothing really jumps out, which is unfortunate because he suspects he could really use some words of his own wisdom. Mostly it’s a passing consideration, a flight of fancy when enough of him thaws to remember what the hell’s going on.

But… yes, back to time. There’s been… a lot of it, after all _that_ —since Jon and the Web and the recorder turning on but obeying none of his attempts to figure out why. Predictably enough, he hasn’t given so much as a thought to seeing if he can turn it off, whatever straggling bits of hope the Lonely permits him to indulge preventing him from that means of emotional suicide. As it were.

Mostly, he just keeps toying with the strand in his chest, inasmuch as he can with it being… not terribly real and all. It is beautiful, though, reminds him of something to do with childhood and dewy mornings and secret places in the back garden—not necessarily his memories, but that idyllic Other world he so coveted as a boy, the fantasy to ever aspire for taken from picture books and calendar catalogs. Plus, his mum hated spiders. 

_Look at me, now_ , he thinks bitterly, tracing his fingernail over the cassette chamber where the reels sparkle intermittently. _Bet you never thought I’d amount to this, huh?_

The fog curls tighter around him as a result, a duvet that offers no tangible warmth, but the weight is good. Lovely, almost, were he to open his eyes, but he can’t doze in and out of misery if they’re open. So they’re not. And he doesn’t see how lovely the Lonely can be. 

Just as well, it keeps the cabin from ruining his pity party, its wood and plaster and stone sagging in on themselves from the battering ram agony of the world outside. The ocean in his head keeps most of the sounds at bay, too, providing an illusion of solitude, but the occasional howl does sneak through, and he mopes further and further into the Lonely’s soothing chill. 

And still the recorder hums away, never quite drowned out, and not wholly loud enough to pick his spirits up from the dregs. 

‘ _Really don’t know what you’re expecting,_ ’ he murmurs, when the Lonely ebbs away for another countless time.

It seems content to keep these almost tidal-like patterns, crests of impregnable apathy intermingled with lulls of clarity, such that Martin’s not sure which he loathes more. He craves the quiet when his emotions sting back to life, and abhors it in its turn when there’s nothing but ice in his veins and mist on his tongue. There’s no reason to the rhyme, and the recorder is just insult to injury at this point. Whatever point that may be.

‘ _I don’t have anything for you_ ,’ he says, a small age later as it continues to squeal and sputter. ‘ _I don’t know what you want. I don’t know what to do, and I… I don’t want to do anything about it, okay?’_

Somewhere along the frangible line of his awareness, he’d slumped himself over, curling fetally onto his side. He knows his cheek is scraped raw by floorboard and sand, alike—when the latter gets the best of its own corporeality—and he never did clear away that pile of glass, though he hasn't weathered any further lacerations. So he’s just sort of… stayed like that, knees to his chest, arms around his knees, eyes fluttered closed, breath carried along the swells and troughs of the Lonely’s embrace. It’s not comforting. But it’s not… otherwise, either. It just _is_ , and the recorder is completely ruining that.

‘ _Just leave me alone_ ,’ he says.

Instead of that hoped for concession, he receives a disgruntled judder and click, and he cracks open one eye to glare at the machine.

‘ _It’s… okay here,_ ’ he tries to explain, gaze tracking the Web’s string as it winds around and around and around, hypnotically soothing for all the mystery it keeps trying to force him to construe.

‘ _Don’t you remember it? The waves and the sand. I—’_

There’s been no warning to accompany the Lonely’s ebb and flow, and its brutal, numbing entirety bears down on him, all needling fog that fills the last warm spaces beneath his ribs, behind his eyes, till he’s speaking sea smoke. But he doesn’t stop. No, nothing could keep the words in him, now.

‘ _I heard you screaming,_ ’ he says, weeping mist as the recorder glows under the Web’s duress. ‘ _I heard your pain, and I thought, that’s not right, it’s supposed to be gentle here. And I found you to tell you that, so you’d know. Because that’s your burden, and I thought knowing mine would help, too. Maybe even help both of us._

_‘I think it did but… now look at us, look at what you’re doing. Hiding him, or keeping him, or whatever it is you’ve got yourself mixed up in._

_‘Why didn’t you take me? I read it, same as him, am I just not good enough? Am I so…_ ** _nothing_** _to all of this, not even the end of the world wants me?’_

He blinks and finds his hand lifting, though the motion bears no sensation on his arm, his mind giving no such consent. Yet still it makes its way to the recorder, and he watches through a dull lens of half-horrified consideration as his fingers traipse over the button panel.

‘ _You listen and you listen, and I’ve done the same,_ ’ he tells it, unable to muster the strength to stop his tongue as his fingernail picks at the single button that’s been jammed down this whole time. ‘ _I’ve told you everything, but…_

‘ _Why don’t you ever just hear me?_ ’

_Snap!_

_Chk_.

The _REC_ button bites up against the pad of his thumb, and… silence. 

The reels hush to a halt, and a faraway wave weeps along the shoreline of his muted sorrow, soothing away the dents in the sand, those footsteps trod by his mind refusing to be quieted. 

_Oh_ , he tries to think, but even those two meager letters get swept away, cast into fog and gloom. It’s all that he’s good for anymore, isn’t it. All he’s worth without… someone. Someone who means so much, although surely that’s not true, for there’s not even a name to recall, a face or a kiss or a sigh, so they can’t have been anyone all that special.

No, definitely not, because there are no long fingers curling catlike around cups of steaming tea. No sour mouth turned up in a scarce and beautiful smile. No overstuffed cadence made lovely if only for the point of comparison it provides to those even rarer, cinnamon-clove laughs. No myriad scars like a patchwork quilt of indelible personhood mapped beneath fingers and lips alike, marred skin convinced it was not meant for touch, yet accepting it like alms when care and grace was given in place of fists and blades.

_Oh._

_Jon_ _._

‘ _I’m sorry_ ’ Martin says, his vocal chords melting as a warm sob builds up. ‘ _I-I’m sorry, I don’t know. I don’t know what to do or how to help, and it’s—it’s not good here, I know it isn’t, but what else is there?_ ’

The recorder does not answer, though the strand between him and it steadfastly glows, adamant despite its elusivity.

And as he watches it, as the saccharine bulk of the Lonely descends, prompting a thick exhaustion into his bones, and his vision goes slightly double with it, splitting the scene in two. Two recorders, two impregnable filaments of the Web. One too many, in his opinion, so he hunkers down until the worst of the Lonely’s strain has made its rounds upon his person, and only once he can actually taste the fog between his teeth does he open his eyes again. 

The scene hasn’t changed.

Or. It has. But in one, crucial way, it has utterly _not_. 

For one remains as two as—even though the recorder has refitted itself, the Web’s lariat still splits along an axis no longer at the behest of his tired eyes. There’s no trick to it. No easy convolutions beneath which to bury his surprise. Rather the shock radiates out, scratching at the insides of Martin’s veins till a full body _jolt_ seizes him, and he bolts upright. 

The new angle defies nothing of the second strand, itself asserting a smug kind of actuality that makes him feel oddly giddy, a strange ticklish sensation rising up the back of his neck. Similar to its predecessor, this strand sojourns from his chest to the recorder, although there’s something… else about it. 

Visually, it merits no distinction, but there’s _something_ about it, an unwavering _there_ -ness. And whereas it’s twin occupies a more wistful association, this bodes unto a distinctly weighty presence, like a breath being held, or a fist poised to bruise.

It feels _here_. With such vehemence that Martin half chokes on a puff of mist trying to slink down his throat. Doubling over only brings him closer, face to face, with the reality of what swathes from his chest, but he can’t find it in himself to look away, enamored of this strangely benevolent mechanism.

‘ _What are you doing_ ,’ he says carefully, following the tread of the second thread, first with fingers and eyes, and when the former proves just as useless as ever, relegates himself to languorously tracing its pattern.

Down and around, it spills across the floor, but where it anchors itself into the recorder… that’s different. The first strand still winds itself among the cassette, but even in their identical makeup, Martin can see the second one doesn’t snake past the button panel. Instead, it lodges itself fulsomely beneath _PLAY_ , seeming to undulate, almost. Beckoning him. 

Which… sure. Fuck it. What does he have to lose? And mumbling as much, he obliges, jamming his thumb against the button. 

For a fractious second, his world feels rent in two—there he is, a single speck occupying the middle ground between before and after. And then the latter actually arrives, and the present barrels into him, soft as dust on a television screen.

“ _I don’t know how long this will work,_ ” says Jon, his voice perforated with static as it spins out of the cassette. “ _So you need to listen closely_.”

-

“I-I heard you taking Jonah’s statement. Martin, I heard it all.” 

Desperately, Jon tries to keep his words steady, but his pulse has surpassed all reasonable sense of rhythm, his mind, a blur of autopilot desperation. His own thumb is forced brutally against the record button for fear it’ll snap back up, and he’s about an inch away from having the whole bloody device between his teeth for how closely he’s holding it.

He’s staring at the Web— _Webs_. Strands. Tethers. _Whatever_. He’s staring at _them_ , pleading into the recorder, feeling more terribly real than he has since he awoke to this blighted world without Martin.

“I heard you in the Lonely,” he stammers, not for a second taking his eyes off the Web, even as it gives a faint but worrying _pulse_ in response to that. 

“Don’t give in, Martin,” said with as much force as he can convey through the recorder’s reels. “I’m here. I’m-I’m stuck, or-or _something_ , but the Web—this—there’s two now, Martin, from before what I said. The Web it’s—I don’t know, but there’s two strings, and I can only hope that this is getting through. I don’t know what it means yet, but I have an i— _dammit_!”

Falling back on his arse, he just about manages to swap the recorder into his other hand as the one holding it suffers a sharp arc of pain through the tip of his thumb all the way into the center of his palm. A definitive _chk_ accompanies the machine’s tantrum, and he needn’t take three guesses to figure what _that_ means.

“Fuck fuck _fuck_!” He screams into the empty room, bereft of static all over again, a perfect sounding board for his boiling _hate_.

“What is your _damn_ problem!” He demands of the recorder, of the strands still latched to it and himself.

“Is this just to fuck with me? Is that what it is? You’ve got the end of the world, you’ve got _me_ and him and everyone else! Just—tell me what you want!”

Nothing. Of course. 

Of course, nothing and no one and not even a cough of static, though the rage this garners is honestly a bit of an overreaction given his revelations, as it were. Because he wasn’t lying. He does have an idea. A finicky, last ditch inkling of what this means. Surface level, of course. Clearly, the Web has bound him and Martin, and it’s manipulating some means of contact via the recorder as conduit. What diabolical layers scheme beneath that, however, well he’s content to chalk that oversight up to “I don’t have the fucking spoons to even approach it.”

Maybe Martin does, though. With his unfathomable brilliance Jon took so long for granted, maybe he’ll just… get it. If it’s even worked at all, then the last piece out of place resides solely within Martin’s very careful and capable grasp.

Yes. Yes, he’ll know to press play, and he’ll know to record back for Jon. And they’ll marco polo through the whole _fucking_ apocalypse until Jon strangles Jonah with the Web’s oh so conveniently _intangible_ strings, and it’ll be fixed, and he’ll be back, and all Martin has to do is _know_. He has to.

He has to.

_Please_.

Jon hangs his head in his hands, lets the recorder clatter to the floor, which… all the better for it, probably. For him, too. For although the machine stays silent, it is hardly inert, and as Jon waits for that which he knows has almost no chance of working, a steady stream of fog begins to pour from the recorder. From the cassette chamber. No static, just turning reels, and hardly even a wince from the Web still bundled up inside it, and him, and the space between. Just the fog that goes unseen. And a statement, unheard. 

For now, anyway. 

Because—

-

“I can hear you, Jon _Christ_ , I can hear you! You-you heard me? And all of that? And the Web? You–I mean—”

He’s half panicked, half elated, half terrified, and only half aware that fractions don’t add up like that at all, but that’s wholly inconsequential to the fact that he _can_ —he can hear Jon. And Jon can hear him. They can—whatever’s going on with the recorder—it can—there’s—

“I-if I press record it works, is it doing that for you? Jon? I have two—the Web I mean. And I—yes it’s some sort of connection, but I don’t know if—but we can—Jon I…”

He pulls a dizzying lungful of air because he’s forgotten to breathe this whole time. It feels good, steadying enough to ward off what bits of Lonely have lurked their way deeper inside. He exhales, and his nerves seem to bolt themselves down in ironclad determination.

“Where are you, Jon,” he says carefully, enunciating each syllable into the recorder. 

“What happened.”

-

Merciful, the _REC_ button clicks down after Jon’s gotten his bitter fill of sardonic laughter.

“I doomed the world, Martin,” he answers. 

“And you with it.”


End file.
